LAST WEEK, United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on his X account, that: “Millions of children have already enrolled in Trump Accounts. With automatic enrollment, over 60 million more eligible children now have an account ready to be claimed.”
According to its own website, Trump Accounts “provide eligible American children with tax-advantaged investment accounts courtesy of President Donald J. Trump.”
This is big news because investment is something that mature and financially secure individuals do. The young, having limited resources, can’t invest in anything until they have secured a source of income.
The Trump Accounts invert that process by directly giving citizens a portfolio even before they enter the workforce. This is a glimpse of the future, and can be as pivotal as paying into social security.
By giving ordinary citizens stakes in the economy, the Trump Administration is changing incentives structures. It forces the average person, even those who have not yet joined the work force, to care about markets, interest rates, CPI, etc.
It also creates a system where the average citizen is no longer just a wage-earner but a stake holder.
The idea behind this is nothing new, and the notion that the average person should have a stake in the economic activity of a country has appeared on both the right and the left.
What has changed, however, is the nature of economics. We, or at least, the US, may very well be headed towards an automated economy, in which case, employment and labor will undergo radical changes.
To cope with this transition, universal equity may be one of the best solutions. That means that salary and wages will no longer be the primary source of income of the average citizen. It will be replaced by dividends, assets and stakes in the general economy.
Now, the details behind this system is still new and I expect that there will be alterations in the future, but if artificial intelligence abundance is real, and if the old economic system continues to break down due to deglobalization and rising global debt, what Trump is attempting to do is a preview of what is to come./PN
